Town-Meeting College

Walter Hendricks had a good, secure job, teaching English and the humanities at Illinois Tech; he had been there for 25 years. But he had always had another kind of college in his mind's eye: a small one, about town-meeting size. Hendricks thought he knew just the place for it.

For 15 summers, he had spent his vacations on a farm high on Potash Hill, in the nearly deserted Vermont hamlet of Marlboro. Marlboro had once been a flourishing center, but its industry and population had gradually dwindled until three years ago even the postofice shut down. Now a few houses, clustered around a little church and a long-closed inn, were all that remained. Hendricks bought the 150-year-old farm next door to his own and set to work.

Pie & Pigs. In Vermont's hills, he found friends to back him. Over apple pie & cheese, Hendricks unfolded the scheme to Poet Robert Frost. "I'm going to start a college, Bob," he said. Replied Frost: "I'll be durned. I always wanted to, myself."

As Hendricks left the Frost cottage, with the poet's promise to lecture at the new college, the aurora borealis was flashing across the skies; Hendricks took it as a good omen. At midnight he reached the home of another summertime neighbor and friend, Dorothy Thompson. She liked the idea, too, and agreed to help. So did Author Dorothy Canfleld Fisher, Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Pianist Rudolf Serkin.

Things have been humming ever since. Last winter, Serkin and his father-in-law, Violinist Adolf Busch, gave a benefit concert in nearby Brattleboro and raised $3,800 to start the money-raising ball rolling. All summer, carpenters and masons have pounded nails and poured concrete to convert the colonial farmhouses for college use. For weeks an advance party of prospective Marlboro students has been working too. That is part of the Hendricks idea: at Marlboro, city-bred students will learn to use their hands: raise pigs, tap maple trees, make their own skis.

This week Marlboro College is ready to open its doors, officially on schedule, but there is still plenty of work to be done. The dirt road from Molly Stark Highway to Potash Hill needs a macadam surface. The college "laboratories"--war-surplus huts from an army air base--have not arrived.

Call Me Mister. For the first year, at least, Marlboro plans to admit only 100 students, 60% of them ex-G.I.s, with New England solidly represented. Faculty members will have no ranks or titles; just plain "Mister" will do. (Hendricks picked up that idea at the American University in Biarritz, where he taught English to G.I.s in World War II.) The college will have no rules except those voted at a "town meeting" of faculty and students.

There will be no departmentalization. "We are interested," says Hendricks, "in broad general education, cutting across the narrow lines of specialized interest. . . . We want to integrate the learning of all branches of education. When we teach literature or language, we want our students to learn at the same time the history of the period which they are studying. We want faculty members who, in a political science course, can teach a little literature. . . .

"In our first-year course, 'Introduction to America,' we want to examine what made this nation, what it stands for and examine its possibilities for the future. We will make a study of the philosophical, social, political, economic, industrial and artistic parts of the nation's life in an attempt to understand and appreciate the ideals and beliefs of the people who have made America."

Last week the Marlboro Inn was getting ready for business again, the government had decided to re-establish a post-office at Marlboro, and a general store was to open soon. To Marlboro College's Vermont neighbors, Walter Hendricks himself looked like a reasonable facsimile of the kind of "people who have made America."

Elsewhere in New England, a projected college gave up the ghost last week. Stringfellow ("Winkie") Barr had chosen Stockbridge, Mass, as the site for a new "Great Books" college (TIME, Aug. 19, 1946). It was to be almost exactly like the one he was leaving--St. John's College in Annapolis, Md.--and an old St. John's pupil, Paul Mellon, had anted up $4,500,000. But in the face of rising costs, even that tidy sum did not look like enough, and last week Barr called it quits.

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